Switzerland Today

Greetings from Zurich!

It’s not quite Trump-Gate, but the election number crunchers have created some murmurs by miscalculating the way votes were cast last weekend. It’s not bad enough to see a storming of the Bundeshaus, but it has caused a few red faces.

But first, here’s the news of the day.

Keystone/gaetan Bally

In the news: funding suspended for Middle East NGOs, Swiss Post slashes jobs and new budget figures.

• The government is having trouble predicting how the books will balance for the nation at the end of the year: a CHF4.8 billion original deficit forecast was reduced to CHF1.5 billion in June but has now been raised to CHF1.8 billion.
• This has not stopped the government announcing a further CHF84 million in researching funding to compensate for Switzerland being downgraded in EU research projects.
• Swiss funding for 11 Palestinian and Israeli NGOs, however, has been suspended.
• The Swiss postal service will shed 3,855 mainly part-time workers next year in a subsidiary that delivers advertising material.

© Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle

Number crunching

The results of the Swiss general election were broadly known on Sunday night – and were broadly speaking accurate. But not quite.

While it remains true that more voters favoured the Swiss People’s Party than in 2019, and fewer voted for the Green party and Green Liberals, there were some errors in the counting.

On Thursday, the Federal Statistical Office was forced to issue an amended version of the aggregate votes cast, mainly affecting the parties in the centre of the political spectrum.

It seems that a programming error in cantons Aargau, Glarus and Appenzell Inner Rhodes had counted votes multiple times.

Now that the error has been identified, and corrected, what does this mean? It turns out that the Centre Party did not accrue more votes than the Radical Liberals after all but ended up with marginally fewer overall votes.

It must be noted that the counting error does not affect the number of seats each party will have in parliament.

But it could have a bearing on the number of ministerial positions that will be allocated to representatives of the leading parties.

Under the Magic Formula, the three parties that attracted the most votes should each get two ministerial seats and one post should go to the party in fourth place.

For a few days, the Centre Party believed they had a chance of grabbing an extra ministerial seat from the Radical Liberals. That dream now looks to have ended.